Epilogue
HER STORY
One
I’LL BET WHEN you cracked open my first book, you didn’t know you’d signed up for New World History 101, huh?
Or Her-story, if we’re getting technical.
It’s hard to document exactly how it happened—hard to do it right—but there needs to be a record, so we don’t end up here again, repeating the same mistakes. So someone can see the warning signs, and take a stand.
So you can save the world, if it ever needs saving again. And I’m betting it will.
Right now, all I can do is tell my own truth.
Fang was really alive.
Kate found an envelope addressed to me, from Dylan. It said: “I knew you would choose him, and I accept that. If I can’t live with you, then please believe I’m happy to die for you, my love. Forever yours, Dylan.”
I cried for like three days over that, over Dylan’s unbelievable sacrifice—for me.
Fang was confused at first, having lost months of his life, and had to train his body to work again after being in stasis for so long. But, being Fang, he was soon himself again, and even got used to his new wing faster than I’d expected. It wasn’t long before we were taking one of the last outside flights we could take, before the nuclear winter really hit and we’d have to go underground.
And Dylan was really dead. It took years for me to make peace with that, to not feel guilty, to know he had chosen to do that, and that I hadn’t killed him. But it wasn’t easy. And… I missed him. I missed his smile, his dependability, his sweetness and honesty. I would always miss him. There would always be a Dylan-shaped hole in my heart. But I was thankful every single freaking day that I didn’t have a Fang-shaped hole in my heart. ’Cause I wasn’t sure I’d survive that.
Anyway, it was on that last flight that I gave Fang the big news.
“A what?” he said, staring at me.
“A baby,” I repeated.
He forgot to fly and started dropping out of the sky. I just waited for him, and he soon joined me again.
“Like, a baby?”
“I believe that’s what they’re called, yes,” I said primly.
“Are you sure?” he asked, and I rolled my eyes.
“It’s kicking me,” I said. “From the inside.”
As you know, Fang is fairly expressionless. But the look on his face when he finally got that he was going to be a dad was… pure exhilaration. The most joy I’d ever seen on anyone. It filled me with a warm glow that kept me going, long after we had to move underground.
But living like a termite (ugh, don’t remind me) was harder than I’d imagined it could be. It felt like being buried alive. Some of the illusion technology kept functioning and projected city streets or starry skies, but every time I tried to fly, I crashed into the low ceilings.
When you’re a claustrophobic bird kid, an underground compound really is the definition of hell. No matter what blissed-out German word you choose to name it.
Our only window to the outside world was a tiny camera that poked aboveground. We watched the screen for months as rain started to fall, and then snow. Then the temperature dropped and the ice came, and all we saw out of the lens were thick, blue-white crystals.
“Trust me,” Angel said. “Not yet.”
Not yet.
So we lived like moles, navigating tunnels in near darkness, turning pale in artificially lit rooms. Once I ended up in Dylan’s former room by mistake. Several kids had moved in there; it was big enough, and none of its belongings reminded me of Dylan. But still, I saw his face silhouetted against the silk wallpaper, imagined him sleeping on the round waterbed that now held two smaller mutants. My heart ached for him, and all he had wanted, and all he had done for me. It probably always would, and that seems fitting, somehow.
We all dreamed of the sun and breathing fresh air.
It wasn’t all bad, though. In the room I shared with Fang, I swore through a much-too-long childbirth and may have punched Fang and ripped a pillow in half, but I ended up with a wrinkled, utterly perfect nugget of joy as a souvenir.